|
Aswad -> RE: Misogyny and BDSM (1/4/2010 11:29:58 AM)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Psychonaut23
Rational people.
Who decides that? And who determines who is rational?
quote:
I think a better question would be HOW does one determine if a morality is false. To do that you have to examine it to see if it is a) based on rational axioms and b) universal.
We can dispense with the notion of universal morality in any meaningful sense, or simply note that humans by their nature are only marginally less amoral than the completely amoral reality in which they operate and then get on with defining a term that is meaningful, useful or applicable to either humans, reality or both. That, or we can adopt some irrational approach.
Now, for the term "rational" to have meaning when applied to axioms, they must be reducible. And if evaluating whether a morality is false, it is necessary to evaluate whether any reducible axioms are false. In the end, you are left with a set of irreducable axioms and a truth value for the proposition that the reducible set is consistent with the irreducable set. In effect, a false morality is one that isn't consistent in this regard. A morality cannot be shown to be true in this manner, however, as no meaningful morality can be derived from irreducible axioms that are demonstrably true (to the limit of demonstrability, which is a significant factor in any case). As such, the term truth hardly applies.
Your principal flaw is that you have constructed or assimilated a meta-ethic framework which ascribes to a set of a priori values that are used as a yardstick for measuring the merit or utility of any system of ethics thus evaluated. I would argue that you cannot demonstrate this set to be necessary and sufficient to any task other than to determine the conformity of a given morality to your template for what a morality must be. That is no different from every other absolutist or deontist with a fixed notion of morality that is applied to everyone, save that you have indulged in gratuitous complexity and needless multiplication of entities in the process.
Actual moral relativism is perfectly compatible with harmonious living, and does not need to be self-serving (though a coherent case can be made that a just, equitable and harmonious society can be constructed from first principles that include enlightened self-interest as a central axiom). For that matter, moral relativism permits the existence of systems that are fully formal in nature, and even systems that deal with other systems in formal terms. Subjective quantities like utility and the like can also be introduced, but are certainly not necessary.
Fact of the matter is that an argument against any consistent morality requires buying into a different morality than the one in question. That in itself invalidates the notion of universality, as if it weren't invalid enough to begin with. That a morality may appear self-evidently wrong is not a logical argument, but a rhetorical one, which discards reason as the instrument by which to evaluate it. The only objective evaluations that can be made with regard to any morality, are those which do not depend on anything but the proposition being evaluated and the contents of the morality being evaluated. For instance, a morality can be shown to be inconsistent with itself, but a value judgement as to whether that is a negative thing still depends on a metric, a set of values, and those are assumptions, not objective facts.
Moral absolutism would be a real comfort for many, probably myself included, if it weren't demonstrably false.
As it stands, moral absolutism is an intolerant subset of moral relativism.
Health,
al-Aswad.
|
|
|
|
